Textual Entailment Using Different Similarity Metrics

Textual entailment (TE) relation determines whether a text can be inferred from another. Given two texts, one is called the “Text” denoted as T and the other one is called “Hypothesis” denoted as H, the process of textual entailment is to decide whether or not the meaning of H can be logically inferred from the meaning of T. Different semantic, lexical and vector based similarity metrics are used as features for different machine learning classifiers to take the entailment decision in this study. We also considered two machine translation evaluation metrics, namely BLEU and METEOR, as similarity metrics for this task. We carried out the experiments on the datasets released in the shared tasks on textual entailment organized in RTE-1, RTE-2, and RTE-3. We experimented with different feature combinations. Best accuracies were obtained on different feature combinations by different classifiers. The best classification accuracies obtained by our system on the RTE-1, RTE-2 and RTE-3 dataset are 55.91%, 58.88% and 63.38% respectively. MT evaluation metrics based feature alone produced the best classification accuracies of 53.9%, 59.3%, and 62.8% on the RTE-1, RTE-2, and RTE-3 datasets respectively.